New products, Conferences, Books, Papers, Internet of Things

Archive for March, 2011

Wireless Sensors, LLC today announced the release of SensiNet, its third generation wireless sensor network designed to address environmental monitoring in Data Centers, Life Sciences and Industrial applications where ease of deployment and extreme reliability are critical. SensiNet is a building block data acquisition and reporting system leveraging the power of advanced wireless mesh network architecture and spread spectrum frequency hopping radio technology to provide a complete solution for crucial environmental monitoring. Its building block approach is cost effective for the smallest application but scales easily to address enterprise class needs.

Battery operated Smart Sensors are available for ambient temperature and humidity, resistance temperature detectors (RTD’s), 4-20mA and contact closure inputs allowing reporting and data logging of virtually any physical measurement. They automatically form mesh sensor networks upon power up eliminating complicated programming and all configuration parameters such as RTD type (2,3,4 wire, 100 Ohm PT, 10 CU, etc) is done over the air.

The Wireless Sensor Applied Research (WiSAR) Lab is a developing national centre in wireless sensor network research based at the Letterkenny Institute of Technology (LYIT), Donegal, Ireland. The core research is in the field of wireless body area networks (WBAN). Funded by Enterprise Ireland and led by the CNRG research team at LYIT, the WiSAR Lab is becoming a centre of excellence in wireless sensor networks and our goal is to become the hub of research and applied wireless solutions for technology companies in the North West of Ireland.

The WiSAR Lab is seeking to recruit an RF Research Engineer in Wireless Sensor Networks to perform research and development work on ultra low-power protocols for wireless sensor network solutions, with an emphasis on Body Area Networks. It is desirable that applicants have at least three years of relevant industrial experience and possess expertise in the following areas:

Applicants must have an Honours Degree or higher in Telecommunications, Electronic or Computer Engineering or in a related discipline. In addition, it is desirable that applicants have post-graduate qualifications in a relevant engineering discipline and experience of working in a research environment. Excellent communication skills are essential and authorship of quality publications and/or patents would be a major advantage, as would practical knowledge and experience of electronic system design.

For an application form and further details on the post the applicant should contact:
The Human Resources Section,
Letterkenny Institute of Technology,
Port Road, Letterkenny, Co Donegal, Ireland
(t) +353-74-9186046 (f) +353-74-9186041
(e) recruitment@lyit.ie

Starting today, when your navigate from an iPad to wsnblog you are given a beautiful app like experience. Content layout changes according to the way you are holding your iPad. A built-in share button makes it very easy to share content on Twitter, Facebook, and E-mail.

That’s because having all those devices connected to a network will make it easier to run any number of aspects of life that have an impact on the environment more efficiently. That can range from power grids, to traffic or to fuel efficiency. The biggest opportunity lies in placing all those devices on a smart grid — a highly efficient power grid that uses advanced programs and wirelessly connected devices to distribute power without wasting it. Vestberg made the comments at the CTIA Wireless 2011 conference in Orlando, Fla.

“In the next 5 years, we expect two-thirds of all electronics will have some connectivity in them,” Vestberg said. “That means we can use a much more powerful grid in our society and reduce our impact on the environment drastically.”

There’s also a holistic opportunity to reduce the impact that other connected devices — such as vehicles — have on the environment, he said. One way would be to give drivers the ability to “download” more horsepower to their vehicles when they need it, like when they are going on a long trip or going up a hill. If they don’t require it, the car automatically restricts that horsepower — increasing fuel efficiency and reducing carbon emissions.

Location privacy is one of the major security problems in a Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). An eavesdropper can keep track of the place and time devices are communicating. To make things even worse, the attacker does not have to be physically close to the communicating devices, he can use a device with a stronger antenna. The unique hardware address of a mobile device can often be linked to the identity of the user operating the device. This represents a violation of the user’s privacy. The user should decide when his/her location is revealed and when not. In this paper, we first categorize the type of eavesdroppers for WBANs, and then we propose a new scheme to provide the location privacy in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs).

It never occurred to me that crowdsourcing radiation data from Geiger counters would be an application for Pachube! But, in light of recent events, radiation data has been pouring into the system while our community has been coming together to build how-to’s and docs so people can get up and running. Open hardware and open data is coming together here to do what authorities couldn’t do nearly as fast: a national real-time map of radiation data, accessible to everyone. As of Monday morning, we are hosting hundreds of feeds.

How has my particular region been affected in relation to other parts of the country?

How are radiation levels changing with the weather?

Is my data consistent with official reports at home and abroad?

Pachube is also already enabling the foundations of higher-level applications to be built on top of this radiation data. Haiyan Zhang, an Interaction Designer at the design consultancy IDEO, wrote that she had the desire to “just make something”, and in an afternoon she had put together a map visualization of the data. The guys over at Uncorked Studios, a creative firm that builds mobile, social, and location products, built RDTN.org where they are aggregating data and providing additional resources. This stuff is getting built super-fast and is able to be tailored quickly to specific needs around the world.